Oracle Proposes Open Source Persistence Project at Eclipse Foundation

Submitted by Ty on March 6, 2007 - 2:00pm

Today, at the EclipseCon Conference, Oracle, a newly appointed Eclipse Board Member and Strategic Developer, announced it will donate its award winning Java persistence framework, Oracle TopLink, to the open source community. In addition, Oracle announced the proposal of a new Eclipse project to deliver a comprehensive persistence platform based on the contribution of Oracle TopLink, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, source code and test cases.

With its latest contribution and project proposal, Oracle continues to demonstrate its commitment to the developer and open source communities. Oracle TopLink is the industry's most advanced persistence architecture, offering object-to-relational, object-to-XML, and Enterprise Information System data access through all of the major standards, including the Java Persistence API, Java API for XML Binding, Service Data Objects, and the
Java Connector Architecture. It has consistently provided developers with superior performance and choice. Built on industry standards, Oracle TopLink works with any database, any application server, any development toolset and process and any Java application architecture. Since its first commercial release in 1994, thousands of customers have chosen Oracle TopLink to bring greater agility, better decision-making and reduced cost and risk to diverse IT environments. Now, by donating the source code and
test cases of Oracle TopLink, Oracle is making the first complete enterprise persistence platform available in open source and to the greater developer community.

"Oracle has been an Eclipse member since its inception and significant contributor," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "The donation of Oracle TopLink to the open source community is a win-win for Eclipse and the community. We are excited about the opportunities this proposed project presents and for the community which
will gain a complete and comprehensive open source persistence platform."

In addition to its code contribution, Oracle proposes to lead a new Eclipse run-time project to provide a set of persistence services that can be utilized in Java and OSGi environments. Working closely with the Eclipse Foundation, Eclipse member companies and other contributors, Oracle will use the existing code base of Oracle TopLink as the starting point for this project. Through its participation in the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group, Oracle will also work with the group members to create a set of blueprints that define how OSGi applications can access standardized persistence technologies.

"Our latest contribution and added commitment to Eclipse demonstrates Oracle's continued efforts to initiate, lead, support and contribute technology, innovation and resources to the open source community," said Dennis Leung, vice president software development, Oracle. "From our experience in leading several projects, we know that Eclipse has an
enthusiastic and vibrant following. We are very excited to grow our involvement by bringing all of TopLink to Eclipse and delivering a comprehensive persistence platform."

"Interface21 has worked closely with Oracle on the integration of Oracle TopLink technology with the Spring Framework 2.0, which has been tremendously successful with the open source community," said Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring Framework and CEO of Interface21. "Now with all of TopLink being available under open source, this provides an even richer persistence platform for the community and we are excited about the
proposed move to Eclipse. This will enhance the community involvement that is so important to Spring customers."

Oracle's Commitment to Eclipse

The Eclipse Foundation is one of several open source communities in which Oracle invests significant development resources. As a leading participant in both the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) and the Technology project, Oracle currently leads the JavaServer Faces tooling, Dali JPA tools and BPEL tools projects.

The Eclipse Persistence Platform project will be available free of charge under the Eclipse Public License. For more information about Oracle's development and contribution of open source solutions, visit http://otn.oracle.com/tech/eclipse